from THE LESSON

The hanger decks on the VORAX I orbital station looked typical enough. The outermost margins were of the curved bubble construction. Everything well organized. No confusing holographic scenery here.

After passing many varied and sundry craft parked in rows, there sat the first great Vorax contribution to space travel: The Star Slipper. Over fifty years ago Gustav Vorax with the debut of this vehicle started the cloud hopper craze where tens of thousands of people worldwide built their own privately owned short duration orbital trans atmospherics. I had seen vids of its sensational space flight trials. As a child I had built a model of it that I later inadvertently blew up. An elegant craft of oblong centrimorphic cultivated chrystopoly design hull with hyper ion hydrogen drive. It looked very on museum display. A tiny lami vid placard described its features and specifications in detail in five linkable media and seventeen languages. I took the tour of its opalescent beauty.

About a hundred meters away along a gantry and scaffold storage area I found my destination with first sight of the vessel Gustav would take to Mars: the Star Spor. It sat away from the other space craft. Set aside by its small size and it’s round shape. Not really round though, multifaceted like a highly polished gigantic marble shaped gem stone. From far away it looked to be a perfectly rounded sphere. Closer approach revealed countless facets in each a transparent backlit glow. There was also a tourist’s helper vid info placard here. I asked it for the little ships details:

“Star Spor is a semi liquid crystal hulled lamiware interplanetary vehicle designed and built by Gustav Vorax.”

That’s all that was said. Brief indeed. Star Spor is chock full of interesting secrets no doubt. The Government is supposedly mulling over the decision to purchase several dozen of like craft. And a limited capability prototype is purportedly in the hands of the taxi shuttle manufacturing cartel. Carla dutifully explains to me that Gustav’s real vision for the Star Spor’s technological innovations is as extra-large heavy tonnage interstellar ‘crystal ships’ of legend and rock and roll lyrics. She went gleefully on to tell me in a tour guide style a presentation of Star Spor specs peppered with many catch phrase slogans and neologisms and wave after wave of statistics that it was the most advanced space craft ever flown by humans. Her duties as staff epistemologist covered translating the quantum speak of the theories that it flew on. She practiced her trade on me to help me understand how a space ship without tremendous fuel tanks and rocket nozzles could ever get to Mars.

The trouble and beauty of electrons is you can so easily manipulate them into power grids or vid screens or memory strips. They are either right there flowing where you want them or not. Putting them to work for you by controlling the electrons interactive behavior can become many useful products. The trouble and beauty of gravity is it is everywhere absolutely only in varying degrees of intensity and strength due to densities and mass and rotation and proximities. Despite being everywhere it is almost impossible to pin down and control. Hard to make a product out of gravity; except in space. The best way to influence it is with tremendous masses or very fast rotations. Star Spor carries a six cube mass of neutrons that spins in a dark matter filled antimatter bottle. This is not an engine but a gravity detector. What the detection of gravity allows is an awareness of its existence as a wave force. Detection of gravity in the most subtle of increments allowed systems to be designed to appreciate the differences in the wave forms. Mapping the situation of gravitational fields and the newly devised detection technologies allowed the manipulation of a craft in relation to the apparent subtle forces. Quite a lot of acceleration can be expected in a gravitation transitional proximity.

The instruments of gravitational measurement become ships themselves. The gravi-drive ship is a massive gravity field instrument tuned to either fall toward any great mass, attractive, or rise, repellant, away toward low gravity proximities. The best detection is the result of the creation of a gravitational field in a sensitive environment set to respond to differences in all nearby apparent gravitational fields. The reaction of the instrument itself is amplified by its own gravitational field. The instrument/ships gravitational field is controlled by reaction to nearby gravitational fields in order to move along on the waves produced by them.

Carla says to think of a ship in space as being nothing more than a barrier. It’s a moveable barrier that is not to keep something out but keep an environment within. Our spaceflight efforts of the past were restricted to super strong hardened hulled bullet type rocket projectiles carrying fireproof bottomed glider planes. The interplanetary product of our planets human compliment amounted to bolted together shelves for boxes of gadgets, slow solar sail craft, giant fuel tanks with thruster nozzle ends. Ships like this still blast off from the surface or are hurled out of close orbit still to this day. Compared to the Star Spor these are the human equivalent of ‘puffballs’ made of tissue and spit.

The semi liquid crystal lami ship like Star Spor is grown from the outside in. It was built at nano scale by nanobots. It gets larger and smaller, expands and contracts, rounder or more faceted. In fact the faster you go the rounder it gets. The outermost layers are lain atom by atom into the semi liquid crystalline matrix. Subsequent layers that are lain inside the outer layer number into the many trillions, each to its predetermined purpose. It is this crystalline shell facet construction that creates the great thickness in cross section. Inside the facets are layers of nano sized manifold chambers conducting substances that feed the crystals structure for repairing the surface, transmitting heat, or transforming the structure itself according to conditions. The hull is an alive electro chemical liquid crystal. That is if you consider gazillions of nanobots alive. It is a crystal structure in a state of controlled arrested development. Its surface due to subtle influences can solidify where it has to, liquefy, add layers, or just soften up a little. Careful tuning of the electromagnetic fields within and without and the nanoscale machinery makes use of piezo discharges and ionization. This provides the environment inside without bulky elemental system equipment. Everything needed is in semi-solid state ion oriented flux in the crystalline structure. Essential elements and molecules sort of cooked by tiny chef bots to order as needed.

It is paste up lami controlled. Systems are created and lami’d up where needed. Essentially it is hollow, empty. Anything needed that is gravity centered on a horizontal plane is created with gravi-solid field manipulation. A table or seat is built by gravi fields defined by fine colored border lines. The lamiware program controls the fields shapes. The surfaces have a gentle give equal to the finest cushions.

The whole ship prepared for interplanetary travel is completely transparent or mirrored or black or any color and sometimes all those at once depending on active states and conditions. There is no need to carry fuel, no need for masses of elemental substances, there are no control engines or antenna or solar arrays. It is a huge mirrored disco ball of space.

Star Spor does not have any engines at all. The ship is powered by gravity. Pulled and propelled by gravity. It is a super sensitive instrument for the measurement and calculation of gravity waves. Gravity permeates the universe. The waves and reverberations ring upon all masses always. The Star Spor can ride these waves, ahead of these waves and hypothetically it has been calculated as able to accelerate to near light speed by slingshot maneuvers. Steered by the sensitivity of its attractions and repulsions Star Spor is the first true gravity powered interplanetary. Not much room on there though and Carla wants to go too.